More Starship Troopers on the way

by Stephen Schleicher

While the first Starship Troopers movie brought a lot of attention to the bug menace that threatens the universe, subsequent movies didn’t fare as well. There was a very well done animated series that ran about eleven years ago, and it had some critical acclaim, which is probably why the next entry to the SST universe is going to be an animated feature.

Starship Troopers: Invasion will be directed by Shinji Aramaki, who was behind the Appleseed and Halo Legends features. And yes, SST: Invasion will be in the anime style.

In Starship Troopers: Invasion, a distant Federation outpost protected by the Starship John A. Warden comes under attack by bugs and the team on Fast Attack Ship Alesia is assigned to help evacuate the survivors and bring military intelligence safely back to Earth. Before the attack ship can rendezvous with the starship, Carl Jenkins, now at the ministry of Paranormal Warfare, takes the starship on a clandestine mission and goes missing in the nebula. The battle-hardened troopers are then charged with a rescue mission that may have much more sinister consequences than they ever could have imagined.

Invasion is scheduled to arrive in the summer of 2012.

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Stephen Schleicher began his career writing for the Digital Media Online community of sites, including Digital Producer and Creative Mac covering all aspects of the digital content creation industry. He then moved on to consumer technology, and began the Coolness Roundup podcast. A writing fool, Stephen has freelanced for Sci-Fi Channel's Technology Blog, and Gizmodo. Still longing for the good ol' days, Stephen launched Major Spoilers in July 2006, because he is a glutton for punishment.

I can’t stand the Starship Troopers movie because of how much of a departure it is from Robert Heinlein’s novel. That’s one of my favorite novels of all time, and the movie is just so… wrong. If it hadn’t been called Starship Troopers, I might’ve been able to enjoy it, but I just couldn’t get over that problem.

You can’t look at it that way, you have to look at it as a Verhoeven joint. In that context, it’s every bit as good as Robocop or Total Recall, matched in sheer horror only by Showgirls.

It was visionary in the way it predicted the internet as a tool for propaganda and practically wrote the script for the selling of the Iraq war years before it went down. One of the problems with Verhoeven movies is that they are so prescient that a few years later, the things he predicted actually exist and so you don’t get the joke. There was an Asian newscaster in Robocop. That was supposed to be weird and futurey because they didn’t have Asian newscasters on network news back then.

The movie also serves as a commentary on the book. I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress before I read Starship Troopers, the characters in Mistress are commies, and the characters in Troopers are fascist, so I thought political science fiction was just his thing. I later found out that he actually believed in the values expressed in Troopers, that only soldiers should vote for instance. The movie shows that values like that would bring about a fascist dystopia. So in that sense I think it has something to say over and above the book.

I fully agree with Jimmy. Two things stick out in my mind regarding the novel: The concept of the citizen-soldier and Powered assault armor. One was given lip-service and the other totally disregarded.